Chris L. Firestone and Nathan Jacobs integrate and interpret the work of leading Kant scholars to come to a new and deeper understanding of Kant's difficult book, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. In this text, Kant's vocabulary and language are especially tortured and convoluted. Readers have often lost sight of the thinker's deep ties to Christianity and questioned the viability of the work as serious philosophy of religion. Firestone and Jacobs provide strong and cogent grounds for taking Kant's religion seriously and defend him against the charges of incoherence. In their reading, Christian essentials are incorporated into the confines of reason, and they argue that Kant establishes a rational religious faith in accord with religious conviction as it is elaborated in his mature philosophy. For readers at all levels, this book articulates a way to ground religion and theology in a fully fledged defense of Religion which is linked to the larger corpus of Kant's philosophical enterprise.

This book examines the transcendental dimension of Kant's philosophy as a positive resource for theology. Firestone shows that Kant's philosophy establishes three distinct grounds for transcendental theology and then evaluates the form and content of theology that emerges when Christian theologians adopt these grounds. To understand Kant's philosophy as a completed process, Firestone argues, theologians must go beyond the strictures of Kant's critical philosophy proper and consider in its fullness the transcendental significance of what Kant calls 'rational religious faith'. This movement takes us into the promising but highly treacherous waters of Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason to understand theology at the transcendental bounds of reason.

Building on his earlier work, Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt, Ronald Green presents Kant as a major inspiration of Kierkegaard¿s authorship. Green believes that Kant¿s ethics provided the rigor on which Kierkegaard drew in developing his concept of sin. Green argues that the chief difference between Kant and Kierkegaard has to do with whether we need a historical savior to restore our broken moral wills. Kant rejected faith in vicarious atonement as undermining moral responsibility, and he pointed to the Genesis 22 episode of Abraham¿s sacrifice of Isaac as an example of how reliance on historical reports can undermine ethics. Kierkegaard rejected Kant¿s rationalist solution to the problem of radical human evil. Kant had demolished the ontological proof by showing that whether something exists (including God) can never be logically deduced. Kierkegaard turns this great insight against Kant: whether God has forgiven our transgressions cannot be deduced from our moral need. Either God did or did not intervene on our behalf. ¿This fact.¿ says Kierkegaard, ¿is the earnestness of existence.¿ Green offers unique readings of Fear and Trembling and Either/Or in his analysis and interpretation of Kierkegaard¿s reading and response to Kant and their understanding of divine and ethics. A closing chapter focuses on love in time. In Works of Love, Kierkegaard places emotional feelings within a transcendent context. Erotic love is noble, but it must be purged of self-love and seek the fulfillment of the beloved as an independent being. Only by assuming ethical and religious meaning can romantic love fulfill its promise of eternity.

There is a half-sentence in § 59 of Kant’s Critique of Judgment that appears relatively abruptly and is often overlooked: “so all of our knowledge of God is merely symbolic”. This study attempts to understand this statement by means of an interpretation of the first part of § 59. This interpretation opens up topics like Kant’s concept of symbols, the status of religious symbols, the relationship between symbol and analogy, and Kant’s understanding of the relation of human knowledge to a transcendent God. The book manages to contribute to an understanding both of Kant’s philosophy of religion and of philosophical theology.